State of the Game Update Post Coming Monday

Posted By: May 27, 2012

It’s been a fascinating week in the world of Diablo 3 with a lot of debate around numerous issues and features in the game. On Monday Blizzard will be pushing up a post that explains what the team are working on and some stats for us all to digest.

The amount of people who have even unlocked Inferno is so infinitesimally small, and the number of people who are attempting content beyond what their gear/skill allows, means we don’t really have a ton of data to look at yet. Plus the item economy at the higher levels is extremely limited just because the number of people able to progress is even smaller. People tend to underestimate gear value, or want difficulty progression to be a linear curve. Not everyone enjoys the steep difficulty incline and need to take a step back on improving their characters, builds, technique, etc. But it certainly is a case of overcoming difficulty through skills and gear as there are cases of all classes continuing to clear Inferno post-nerfs.

Anyway, we’ll have an article up on the front page on Monday that gives a couple fun stats, and goes into explaining a few of the things we’re working on and maybe some rough time frames.

I think we’re about to see the busiest weekend for the game yet, with the most amount of people online and enjoying the game together. We’re looking forward to a bright future for the game for years to come. We’re in it for the long haul.

I appreciate there are still a lot of questions, but the post on Monday has quite a bit of info and is coordinated to be posted in about a dozen languages. I really can’t get into too many specifics without ruining the efforts that have gone into ensuring a simultaneous release. I do hope it’s informative, though.

On Inferno and the amount of people who are actually playing Inferno, it’s apparently a very small percentage of players.

No, no, no… far, far less than 1%. 🙂

Over the past week the community have been debating the game intensively and the two camps are very much split down the middle. It’s been hard to keep track of it all, but do keep in mind that constructive criticism is what Blizzard need to see and not “I hate Diablo 3” posts. The more useful feedback that the community can provide, the better chance of seeing some of the fixes and changes you may be looking for.

Really, less than 1%? I’ve completed act 1 inferno a few days ago now, and I have another character on lvl 50, and it’s not like I have all the time in the world with working, training and other social activities you need to take care of these days.

out of the 7 million copies sold, how many people quit after Normal ? How many decided to give the game another chance and continued onto Nightmare ? How many of those people continued onto Hell and then got completely frustrated with no RMAH, with the GAH often being down, with buying gems disabled on the GMAH and just got bored over all and finally quit ?

Not sure that you are, but reading your post makes me think you were a little bit bitter while writing it 😮

6h/day with both my characters included and then I’ve been to inferno for quite some time even if I couldn’t kill shit in the beginning. I’m just surprised because when I was younger and playing D2 I had a lot more time to spend, now I’m crunching out all I possibly can 😉

Really? Less than 1%? I was having no issues till end of Act1 inferno… now playing act 3… Should I feel like a nerd cause of that? lol I know many people that bought this game won’t play often ok, but seriously i was expecting minimum 10-15% of d3 players to be trying inferno right now…

With the 1% statistic, think of it this way; if 5 million people are playing the game (I’m just approximating the number), then 1% would be 50,000 players. I don’t think their numbers are far off. There’s no way there have been 50,000 people posting on these forums or b.net talking about their journey though Inferno.

So, yeah, a lot of people are playing in Inferno, but they’re still a small percentage of total players. It’s kind of like the “hacked” accounts. Even if we see hundreds of posts from people saying they were hacked, that’s only a fraction of a percent of total players.

Indeed. The thing about these numbers are, only a very small fraction of the people who bought Diablo 3 is even interesting in playing Inferno, so it should be no surprise that only an even smaller fraction is actually playing inferno currently.

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I hope the high level gear issue gets addressed. Low and mid level legendaries are fine as they are, but I really hope some of the level 58-60 legendaries get buffed to at least be in the same ballpark as inferno blues and yellows. I’m totally okay with rares being the best possible gear – thats great. But there should be legendaries that are at least like 90% as good as the best possible rare. Currently even mediocre rares and good blues beat out the very best legendaries. And about 75% of the L60 legendaries are just completely worthless. Even fresh 60’s will never use them. That seems messed up.

For example, yesterday I bought a blue level 60 weapon for 50k. An over 800dps polearm. That is better than 90% of the level 60 legendaries, and about on-par with the absolute very best ones. 50k is nothing. Thats one short session of game play picking up gold or one low level item sold on the AH. Its like the developers didn’t even design inferno level legendaries. They stop getting better after hell mode, but inferno blues and yellows scale into the stratosphere.

Rule of thumb Legendaries should always be better than a blue no matter what. As for Rares some should be better and some worse then the legendaries. Note this is assuming that they are all the same item level.

Just hit inferno myself and I’ve been playing pretty hard. It doesn’t really surprise me to hear these stats, got to admit to feeling like an amateur when the first posts started coming up a week ago about people reaching inferno. But now I feel awesome, as I should cause I am =D I’m play’n, I’m kick’n joo azz.

People who want the progression to be a linear curve must have forgotten the first time they beat d2 on NM and went to hell. Boy did I get my butt handed to me in hell, I didn’t know that my resists could go so low! Let alone being one shotted by fallen.

That less than 1% is so BS. People aren’t playing inferno because its so ridiculously broken. I have over 30 friends online who finished hell and after trying inferno act2 for a few days, went back to lvling another char. I’m not even playing at all anymore. I just login and stay in lobby to chat with friends for a bit and thats about all. Good thing I payed 60 euros to wait another year untill they make this game actualy playable/enjoyable.

I am inclined to believe that 1% of people being on Inferno is kinda accurate. Considering the massive difficulty increase in Act III and IV in Hell, I think not that many people managed to catch up with the pace and farming amount required. I think people don’t even have enough gold to buy gear that would cheat their way through Hell. And I also think,that Blizz knew that in first few days of the game, only few will reach the Inferno and those players will be more hardcore audience than rest of the folk out there in the game, so they did not invest too much time into polishing the Inferno. I think we are now open beta testers for Inferno for next few weeks and in couple of months, Inferno will be whole different experience.

wow, ALL of my friends, guild members, distant acquaintances, siblings of friends and other people that are on my flist, including myself must belong to the true elite among diablo gamers as we are all wiping around in act 2 inferno…except a few that were able to progress as they were exploiting sveral farming methods to sell 1k dps weapons on the ah and made a sh1tload of money…out of the ~40 people on my list there are about 5 who have not at least completed a4 hell…